I release in this blog, picking up the baton of Oriol, who was fired a few days ago (sniff) with no intention of continuing his excellent work, because it could not, the bar is too high Anyway, yes I can try to leave my reflections and learning.
Google Analytics is a tool that has many advantages and some limitations, as we all know, especially since I read this blog. Many of these limitations can be solved with small doses of creativity, both labeled in customizing reports. But the worst limitations are those we impose on ourselves, for whatever reason, the result of our own decisions.
And among them are the links to two of the most essential tools that Google provides us, and that all online business use, Google Adwords and Google Webmaster Tools.
The union of these three tools provides a global view of not only what happens on our site, which is the goal of the Web Analytics. It also provides the necessary information on what happens before users reach our site, which is part of the Digital Analytics. The union of these two areas of analytics we provide an important asset in our analyzes focused on both the reporting and the optimization.
AdWords and Google Analytics
If we are not linked AdWords accounts and GOOGLE ANALYTICS but we are conducting a campaign manual tagging can obtain both quantitative and qualitative data about them in GOOGLE ANALYTICS. This will provide basic information about the performance of our campaigns and help us better understand our site and our users.
We know what words and what ads we provide more quality traffic about loyalty (frequency, recurrence), interest (depth, time), and, above all, conversion to those goals we’ve scored. Definitely a very useful information not only for optimizing campaign landing pages but also, site architecture and structure of call-to-actions.
But we’re missing the most important thing: the ROI. I am not linking these two accounts we have no information about costs in Google Analytics. And finally, the ultimate goal of a campaign is to achieve maximum revenue at minimum cost. Having access to the costs we:
Knowing the performance of keywords in economic terms.
The segment between Branded and Unbranded to make decisions about our investment allocation strategy.
Knowing our market share to rationalize our investment over the competition (and uncover potential aggressive strategies).
Compared with the costs of other sources using the functionality to add costs, so that GOOGLE ANALYTICS becomes a complete repository as Google Analytics investments.
Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics
With Webmaster Tools goes a bit the same, but without the cost, which does not apply. With the information available about those visits for SEO starters we know the effect of positioning of the content and objectives, but we miss some very important information about what is happening around us and our competition.
By having the two linked accounts can:
Knowing what we are about the market situation and competition.
Analyze clicks through ratios of our keywords to tailor our content strategy to target the site
Determine our market share in both Branded and Unbranded keywords for strategic decision making over the competition
Knowing in which geographic regions have better performance per product to adapt our business strategy both on and off.
And now is when you ask me … There really are still companies that are not linked these tools? Yes, there are. This may be for several reasons:
By ignorance, although these are less every day.
For corporate policies: there are companies that work with large agencies that have a corporate policy that standardized labeling and management is concerned, for reasons of consistency and internal analysis.
For commercial policies: there are companies that work with large and small agencies whose revenue depends on the performance of this type of campaign and therefore cannot show their management skills issues.
In these cases, the analysis must be done separately and loses some of its wealth, but as we know, a good advanced web analysis is able to achieve results with the tool you have on hand.